So when Paul Wessel with CT Parent Power passed along today’s comic strip from Mother Goose and Grimm by Mike Peters , we just had to share:

Want your organization’s website to do more than dream? Learn how we make penguins fly, enabling our non-profits’ sites to take wing and soar to meet their needs.

Thanks for keeping us smiling, Paul!  We look forward to your new site taking flight with us in the near future!

If you’re from a school, church, or synagogue in the greater DC area, post any help you need this weekend for snow clean up, and we’ll crowdsource the community to help you in your efforts!

All you need to do is follow these simple steps:

1. Go to www.snowmageddoncleanup.com/reports/submit
2. Post your request for help using a title in this format:  “School:  Washington Elementary School” or “Church:  Episcopal Church of Washington”
3. Make sure to specify clearly what your needs are in the body of your report (example: “We’ve got snow covering all our walkways, we need snowblowers and shovels”) and include your location in your report and using the map function.  Also, clearly state when you need people to arrive for help this weekend (example: “we’re looking for 10 people from the neighborhood to come help at 10am on Saturday”).
4. After your report is approved by our team, you can use the link to your report to spread the word.  We’ll do the same on Twitter (using the #72scu hashtag) and on our Facebook Fan page.
5. Keep checking the comments in your report, and encourage others to post their attendance in the comments of your report.

We’ll take these reports and highlight them on Twitter, Facebook, and the Web site!  Let’s clean up our schools, churches, and synagogues one snow shovel at a time!

Here’s a few of our favorite hits thus far.

• Washington Post partners with us on their special Snowmageddon Cleanup Web site.
• NPR affiliate (WAMU 88.5 FM) in Washington DC, Kojo Nnamdi Show: I was pleased to have House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer as my lead into Kojo’s interview with me (skip to 10:40).
• Wired Magazine:  Snowmageddon Site Crowdsources Blizzard Cleanup
• NOS Journaal op 3, the Dutch national television news broadcaster: Video interview at about 7:00 in this clip.
• FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate on Twitter
• New York Times covers our efforts, writes about the open source software we used, saying, “Think about that. The capital of the sole superpower is deluged with snow, and to whom does its local newspaper turn to help dig out? Kenya.”

Check out our site embedded on the Washington Post!

Wow.  Thursday was a whirlwind.  We worked closely with the Washington Post’s digital media team to make editorial and graphical changes to the site in order to prep for the wave of traffic from their online circulation.  Additionally, the great logo that Christopher Doorley made for the site needed to have a little update: announcing the partnership between the Washington Post and PICnet.  Thanks to Ross Nover for his stellar design skills to help update the site’s header and additional illustrations.

It’s been wonderful working alongside the Washington Post team to help spread the word far and wide.  We’re excited to see the continued efforts of the Greater DC community to help each other out of this snow mess.

Since the site, www.snowmageddoncleanup.com was flipped live on Tuesday night, more than 7,000 visitors have come to learn how they can lend a hand in the DC clean up process. Now, with a Facebook fan page and the 72 Hour Snowmageddon Clean Up Challenge, the site has begun to pick up a lot of traction.

The site’s goal is simple: connect those in need with those that have resources.  Got a car that needs to be dug out?  Post it. Got a pair of strong arms that needs a workout after three days of sitting on the couch (most of DC was closed)?  Post it.

Powered by Ushahidi, we’re excited to see how this site, launched with two hours of work, can be used as a model for other emergency or crisis situations that can be utilized by government agencies and NGOs.

While we don’t have enough hands at PICnet DC to clean up the city ourselves, a little bit of crowdsourcing, applied in the right way, just might help us dig out of this mess faster…because snow is only fun when it doesn’t get in the way of trying to get food.

One of the most exciting trips I’ve been able to make this year was earlier this fall when I traveled around the world to Mongolia for their Joomla!Day. There was a great mix of attendees in addition to the usual Joomla! Enthusiasts; including B. Dolgor, the head of the cabinet secretariat for the Mongolian federal government; USAID Mongolia; Mr. T. Altansukh, leader of the Mongolian translation team; and university students.

I was pleased to give one of the keynotes again at this conference and emphasized the impressive achievement of the Joomla! community in Mongolia translating the entire project into Mongolian. I also celebrated the successful adoption of Joomla! across all federal agencies with B. Dolgor. After sharing information from the Joomla! leadership team on the future of project, we highlighted the community’s  potential to make an impact on the global Joomla! community now that they had overcome their biggest obstacle: language barriers.

Next steps for Mongolian Joomla! Community users is to help small businesses through this powerful open-source software, as well as to increase transparency in the federal government. Joomla! Can be an empowering tool that leads to a new way of life – and that’s something we can all be proud to be part of.

Read more about the conference here.

Check out a video interview of me in Mongolia!

There are few events where I get such a great opportunity to meet key individuals in the community, and learn as much hands-on information, and this year’s Dev Summit came through once again. The event was held in Oakland, Calif. from Nov. 18-20, attended by non-profit software developers, evangelists, and technology users.

I was fortunate to speak with Nate Aune from Jazkarta and share stories about building successful businesses around open-source software and the non-profit sector.  I  also had a chance to engage in discussions with Michelle Murrain of OpenIssues, who shared her thoughts on the open-source CMS landscape for the non-profit sector. Ron Severdia, a member of the Joomla! leadership team, also spoke to the group about  design principles and the upcoming Joomla 1.6 user interface.

There were so many more great folks there that I want to give shout outs to, but there is so little time to say thanks to all of them! Aside from hearing from some of these great people, I spoke on a number of key topics, including open-source CMSs, utilizing cloud services, the Joomla! project, and open-source business models that could support our sector. I was most impressed by the terrific feedback and engagement in the open-source business models session, where participants helped share lessons learned and best practices in achieving success while also building sound business models.

You can visit the event wiki to see all the great notes taken during the sessions.

My presentation focused on open source content management systems (CMS) with two perspectives:  that of a company looking to invest in CMS software, and that of a business looking to build a solid business model based on providing services around open source CMS software.  I provided a little snapshot of PICnet’s history, moving from a pure consulting firm to one providing our flagship Non-Profit Soapbox product, while sharing some lessons learned and paths to success.

Many thanks go to our friends at iMasters, who put on this great conference, and who were gracious hosts during my stay in Sao Paulo.  I’m looking forward to next year’s event!

Today marks the first dedicated National Day of Service and Remembrance, on the 8th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. We though it fitting to start our PICnet Volunteer Series today. Every few weeks, we’ll be featuring another PICnet Team Member and his or her service efforts. To read more President Obama’s call for service and the introduction to this series, click here.

Who: Developer Kevin Devine
How he serves: Joomla Bug Squad, maintains release series

When he’s not helping to develop websites for PICnet clients, Kevin takes even more hours out of his day (and night) to volunteer with the Joomla project, as a member of their Development Team. Currently, he is on their Joomla Bug Squad as the co-maintainer of the current release series. To break it down for you, Kevin tests for bugs reported by the community, writes patches, and reviews and commits patches added to the releases. He also serves as a member of the Joomla Security Team, for which he tests for security vulnerabilities in new releases of the open-source CMS and adds the appropriate patches.

Kevin developed an interest in Joomla because of his work at PICnet (Non-Profit Soapbox is Joomla-based), but decided to devote even more time to the platform for several reasons: He believes strongly in open source and the freedom of that type of software, and he enjoys the community he found in Joomla users. “People using Joomla are all contributing their time to build something that for anyone who wants or needs to take advantage of it, it is available.”

Kevin’s involvement in the Joomla community has led to other opportunities as well. He recently collaborated on a SXSW-sponsored “competition” that pitted three major Content Management Systems (Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress) against each other in an effort to develop a model, fully-packaged, and installable site meeting specific requirements of a theoretical non-profit organization. Kevin says it was really satisfying to see members of the larger open source software community devoting time to make an offering to the non-profit community.

And of course, that’s what PICnet is all about too – we love spending our time figuring out how to help non-profits better serve their constituents and communities through the power of the web. Kevin is a great example of how he is applying his skills and interests for a greater cause, and fulfilling a mission to serve. Read more about Kevin.

United We Serve is President Obama’s nationwide service initiative to promote Americans to volunteer in their communities. It is based upon the idea that if all Americans help out, even just a little bit, it will improve their communities and attend to the social needs that have arisen as a result of the economic downturn. Though it began as a pilot program over the summer, it is now expanding into an ongoing program in an effort to make volunteerism a way of life for Americans.

Serve.gov provides all of the information about United We Serve, and is a great site to check out for those interested in finding a volunteer organization in their area or setting up their own service project. The site provides toolkits for a variety of service ideas in areas such as education, health, and energy and the environment. These toolkits provide information on every step of each project’s development, including how to establish a team and set goals. The site also allows you to register your service project and recruit volunteers. Better yet, it is a service built on an open source volunteer opportunity aggregator called All for Good.

So what does all of this mean for non-profit organizations? It means that now is an excellent time for organizations to promote their causes and demonstrate the value they provide to the American public.  An increase in volunteer efforts at organizations will give experiences to community members that the philanthropic community will support. And then – participants who share their testimonials may receive further visibility.

To celebrate the remaining weeks of the pilot program’s term, we thought it appropriate to highlight some of the great work that PICnetters do in their free time. The passion we have working with nonprofit clients to ensure their web presence is a successful tool is just an extension of the value we find in reaching out and helping our communities. That’s the intrinsic reward of working at PICnet.  We hope you enjoy getting to know our team a little better over the next couple of months as we feature a different employee and their volunteer efforts every few weeks. PICnet is proud to be a part of President Obama’s national call to service.